As if that weren’t enough, a subset of them are praising Bing for paying respect to the religious holiday by showing pictures of Easter eggs. All hail the divine ruler of the universe, the Easter Bunny.

Religious people are among the dumbest people on the planet, I’m afraid.

At least one of these fine and upstanding examples of humanity, when pointed out that it was Cesar Chavez, labor organizer and union activist, and not Hugo Chavez, dead dictator, waved it off. They were both socialists.

This is also an example of age related knowledge. The unionization of the farm workers occured 30-40 years ago. I remember it well, as it made the pseudosocialists in the university happy when I was attending. Those under thirty nowadays, I could understand how they didn’t know the name. Their confusion though, is pure ignorance.

Very sad that the day Our Very White Savior rose from the dead isn’t not better rekignized by Goggle and other athyists.

When did he die? Oh, on the “Friday before the first Sunday after the full moon (the Paschal Full Moon) following the March equinox.” [Wikipedia]. This year he died on March 31 and next year he’ll have died on April 20.

My #8: Whoops, he died on March 29 this year, three days before March 31. And he’ll die on April 18 next year, three days before April 20. He always dies on a Friday evening and rises on Sunday morning. Cuz Jebus, that’s why!

Further proof that the Religious Reich shapes their religion to fit their politics and not the other way around. At the very least, the two have become so entangled that they see a corporation with no religious views honoring a labor organizer, and it triggers their persecution complex.

I’ve long wondered whether stupid people just naturally gravitate to religions, or whether the religions make their adherents stupid. Obviously, both effects are in play, but it had to start somewhere.

I guess I forget here in California (also, um, Google’s home state) that not everywhere in the U.S. makes Cesar Chavez Day a holiday.

(Also — it seems that Chavez’s page on the Pffft no longer mentions his pro-LGBT and other solidarity activism, only his farm-worker campaigns and (briefly) his animal-rights attitude. Am I mis-remembering the state of the article in the past, or has it been scrubbed?)

Yes, prfesser, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is so important to Christians that they can’t even settle on the calendar dates these events occurred. Well, I’m kind of like that with my mother-in-law’s birthday. I know it’s sometime in the late fall…

Good thing they pegged his birthday to the winter solstice. They only have to be able to count to four, which can be done on one hand.

well, to be perfectly honest I fucked up in exactly the same way when boyfriend mentioned that he liked that google had a Cesar Chavez doodle instead of an Ester doodle. But my response to being corrected was “oh, right, the guy I told you was being taken out of Texas textbooks. Oops.”

I do not think religion makes people stupid though it sure as hell does help people with thinking their abilities. I think it cognitive dissonance that is the key problem. The religious foster the ability to tolerate for high levels of cognitive dissonance. It also helps to maintain the faith if there are other areas in their lives that are infected with the same kind of processes that give rise to what is termed cognitive dissonance.
This ability to integrate double messages is learned skill so it can be unlearned. My own ability to tolerate cognitive dissonance has never been that good and it has decreased with time and work.
Skepticism is what has grown in strength though skepticism does seem to be a little more socially disruptive than faith.

I was actually pleased that Google would have commemorated Ceasar Chavez, on his birthday.
In a related matter, I happened to blunder into “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, and saw the hosts deadpanning “really, Google, you thought there was a choice ?” Both Scarborough and Brzezinski agreed that it was just shameful that Google couldn’t own up to their mistake and promise to not do it again. It was a
double-Picard-Riker face-palm moment, that found me saying back to them, much sarcasm included , that yes, it’s a pity Google should do such a thing when only white christian USA-ians are ever going to see the google doodle.

It’s not stupidity, but willful ignorance. Stupidity is bad enough, as there is no cure for stupid.
Willful ignorance, the sticking of your fingers in your ears and shouting “yaa! yaa! yaa!” (or whatever) every time someone says something that isn’t what Preacher/Pastor/Imam/Father/Guru/Witch-Doctor told you on [holy day]. Of course, you do have to wonder about people’s reason when they claim to worship a 2000-odd year old Undead, who saved them from a condition imposed on them by his father, the Over-God, who was also his son, and the ghost of his son.

I’d bet it’s less directly because of religion than it is an example of the stunning level of parochial ignorance of USAians. This is a special American kind of dumb.

We do specialize in it, but you see it everywhere if you look. The recent Russian homophobia had a similar smell, as does a lot of the homophobic stuff from Africa, and a certain amount of stuff which makes it into the news from South America.

I’ve long wondered whether stupid people just naturally gravitate to religions, or whether the religions make their adherents stupid. Obviously, both effects are in play, but it had to start somewhere.

Oh, the stupidity came first, I think, don’t you? Someone had to make the religion up, since it doesn’t occur in nature.

My (unproveable) theory on the origin of Christianity is, roughly: a scam artist named Paul, who was what L. Ron Hubbard and Joseph Smith would have been if born around the same time, which is to say an amoral control freak with delusions of grandeur, decided to found a mystery religion, because being a priest was a cushier job than “farmer” or “soldier”, which were the only other options for someone with no talents. He made up a story about a purely-spiritual god — who, in the original version, never incarnated on earth at all — and spread it around. Once it was popular and had spread beyond Paul’s immediate vicinity, a lot of other hucksters realized that they could prey on the average ancient person’s almost complete ignorance of current events elsewhere and claim that the whole thing took place on earth and that they had been god’s disciples while he was here. (This explains why Paul’s writings have so much stuff that’s kind of hard to fit together with the gospels, like the time he asks “who knows god better than me” when according to the gospels there would be hundreds of people at the very least who actually lived in the same towns as god, rather than just having a five-minute vision, which was all Paul ever claimed.) After the original generation passed away, and the church they left behind became a serious institution, their successors both attempted to fabricate history to “prove” the incarnation story (which explains, for example, the forged passage in Josephus) and also destroyed any official history they could get their hands on which might suggest their story was false.

A conspiracy theory? Sure. But then, every religion is, itself, a conspiracy theory: the notion that the entire universe is a lie created to conceal the truth from humanity. What could be sillier than that?

Cesar Chavez has been scrubbed from the history books, if he ever was included. Maybe not in California, but here in New York, I did not learn about him until college (I was in high school in the mid- to late- 90s).

I’m kind of wondering how many of those people actually saw the Google doodle for themselves and how many were just parroting outrage.

I’d bet it’s less directly because of religion than it is an example of the stunning level of parochial ignorance of USAians. This is a special American kind of dumb.

Case in point: those Twitter twits who, see comment 26, made clear that they believe Google only exists in the US. (Or, alternatively, that the US is the whole world.)

(Also — it seems that Chavez’s page on the Pffft no longer mentions his pro-LGBT and other solidarity activism, only his farm-worker campaigns and (briefly) his animal-rights attitude. Am I mis-remembering the state of the article in the past, or has it been scrubbed?)

I’d bet it’s less directly because of religion than it is an example of the stunning level of parochial ignorance of USAians.

This. It’s not like the average USian knows a damn thing about either Cesar or Hugo Chavez when their stupid god isn’t an issue. Easter didn’t magically wipe data from people’s brains. They just don’t give a fuck about history that doesn’t directly involve white heroes (or heroes in general, but that’s a separate rant), or South America in general.

Holy shit! So that’s what people were freaking out about! I couldn’t figure out why so many people were losing it (they were not terribly articulate in their frothing, and I didn’t care enough to dig it out of them). It’s because they can’t use Google to figure out who the person that Google put on their search page was.

How could someone in the US not be familiar with Cesar Chavez? He was mentioned on The Simpsons, I thought that would enshrine him within the collective consciousness.
Then again, the joke was that Homer did not know what he looked like.

Homer: Oh, I’m so hungry. Oh, why keep starving myself? No one
cares.
[there’s a half-eaten pretzel lying on the grass in front
of him. Homer reaches for it. A ghostly man in a white
suit appears and steps on the pretzel]
Who are you?
Chavez: The spirit of Cesar Chavez.
Homer: Why do you look like Caesar Romero?
Chavez: Because you don’t know what Cesar Chavez looks like.

I happen to live on the recently renamed Cesar Chavez Boulevard. As we’re selling D’s car, I’ve been giving out the address to a bunch of folks who are interested. So far, not one of them has even been able to spell the name (for their GPS) without my assistance.

The other really fucking annoying thing is that Hugo Chavez isn’t even bad. I mean, he won’t be remembered as history’s most competent socialist by any means, but most of what makes white people angry is that he nationalized oil (How dare the Venezuelan people profit off of Venezuelan resources? Who do they think they are, USian?). But people are acting like Google supported Satan’s own dictator. Pretty sure Obama is directly responsible for the deaths fo more, and has done less to at least try to help his own people, relative to their time in office.

David Marjanović @39
Actually, Google-doodles are different in different countries, though some are global, like the Douglas Adams one last month.
Today e.g. I am seeing one in honour of Maria Sybilla Merian’s 366th birthday (yay!). The Cesar Chavez one is tagged National Holiday btw., and only appeared in the U.S.

Chavez wasn’t so much a communist as a union protectionist. He understood for wages to rise labor must have some scarcity. By all means celebrate the man, but tell the whole story. Chavez testifying before congress in 1979…

“… when the farm workers strike and their strike is successful, the employers go to Mexico and have unlimited, unrestricted use of illegal alien strikebreakers to break the strike. And, for over 30 years, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has looked the other way and assisted in the strikebreaking. I do not remember one single instance in 30 years where the Immigration service has removed strikebreakers. … The employers use professional smugglers to recruit and transport human contraband across the Mexican border for the specific act of strikebreaking… “

Who the fuck was saying otherwise, you fucking dullard? Who the fuck here said that Cesar Chavez was a communist, you fucking illiterate? You are so consistently fuckwitted that I think I should just pity you from now on. Every time you dive in here, you have so clearly dived in over your head that I think I should just give up on worrying about the turds you drop in the pool and just worry about whether the lifeguard can safely redirect you to the kiddy pool before you hurt yourself.